In a supplier selection process, a buyer sends out a Request for Quotation (RFQ) to potential suppliers and the suppliers respond back with price quotations. The buyer often sends the RFQ to several potential suppliers. However, when a buyer sources, or mines for, potential suppliers, the buyer may have to review its own contacts and may try to identify new suppliers through the Internet, business-to-business (B2B) sourcing websites, or other external database(s). The buyer then contacts the potential suppliers via telephone, fax, and/or email, to get some general information about the potential suppliers before sending the RFQ to selected potential suppliers.
In such an approach, the buyer must go through a number of sources to find potential suppliers. In addition, this approach makes it difficult for the buyer to differentiate the suppliers. The buyer may get information about a number of suppliers, but the buyer has to compare manually the suppliers himself to determine which supplier fits his needs better. Further, the buyer often uses the same criteria to repeatedly search for suitable suppliers. However, the available approach does not allow automatic reuse of the sourcing criteria. The user has to repeat the process for manually collecting a list of potential suppliers, obtaining general information about potential suppliers, and comparing suppliers each time he searches for suppliers.
Thus, it is desirable to introduce a method and system for obtaining information about potential suppliers, analyzing the obtained information and providing ranking of the suppliers to help the buyer to make a decision.